Peace and Justice Post

The Real News Project

Bush’s mystery money man becomes Hillary’s

The Clintons meet with the Bushes at the White House.

by RUSS BAKER and ADAM FEDERMAN

Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Published in conjunction with The Nation.

In the Clintons’ pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who’d slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least as substantial–and still under wraps.

Political junkies will recall Quasha as the controversial figure who bailed out George W. Bush’s failing oil company in 1986, folding Bush into his company, Harken Energy, thus setting him on the path to a lucrative and high-profile position as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and the presidency. The persistently unprofitable Harken–many of whose board members, connected to powerful foreign interests and the intelligence community, nevertheless profited enormously–faced intense scrutiny in the early 1990s and again during Bush’s first term.

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AFP – Thursday, October 25, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – The US terrorist watch list includes more than 755,000 names and continues to grow, the US Government Accountability Office said Wednesday.

The list exploded from fewer than 20 entries before the September 11, 2001 attacks to more than 150,000 just a few months later, after the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) was created in December 2003 to keep tabs on terrorist suspects, according to the GAO, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress.

Including known pseudonyms of suspects, the list’s 755,000 names as of May 2007 represents, in fact, around 300,000 people, according to TSC estimates.

Tasked with gathering data on individuals “known or appropriately suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of or related to terrorism,” the TSC gets its information from Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence and passes it on chiefly to immigration authorities.

Since 2003, the list has been used around 53,000 times to single out individuals for possible arrest or to prevent them from entering the country, the GAO said.

More often, however, people whose names are included on the list for reasons of caution are merely questioned and released, and left to face the same annoyance each time they enter the country, GAO said.

Despite the precautionary zeal, there have been mistakes, it said, adding that many suspects have been stopped by immigration authorities on arrival at US airports when their entries in the TSC list should have prevented them from boarding their planes in the first place.

Describing the list as “quicksand” that traps innocent people for the sake of security, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called on the US Congress to step in.

“How much safer are we when the government turns so many innocent people into suspects?,” ACLU senior legislative counsel Timothy Sparapani said in a statement.

UK Indymedia, October 25, 2007

Stephen Lendman | 25.10.2007 20:22

On October 5, George Bush confronted a public uproar and defended his administration claiming “This government does not torture people.” Again he lied. Once secret US Department of Justice (DOJ) legal opinions confirm the Bush administration condones torture by endorsing “the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” It also condones paramilitary thuggery, oppressive occupation, and genocide. This unholy combination is the ugly face of an imperial nation run by war criminals. That’s the state of things today. First, the practice of torture.

Torture as Policy under George Bush

In a hollow posturing gesture, DOJ publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a December, 2004 legal opinion. That secretly changed after Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General in February, 2005 and authorized physical and psychological brutality as official administration policy. This continues unabated in violation of international and US laws that include fifth and eighth amendment prohibitions against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in all forms for any reason. These practices been long-standing US official policy, nonetheless, but the mask came off post-9/11 when former CIA Counterterrorism Center chief Cofer Black (now Blackwater USA’s vice-chairman) told a joint House-Senate intelligence committee hearing September 26, 2002: “There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11(on the use of torture). After 9/11, the gloves came off” and “old” standards no longer apply. They never did, and Congress knows and condones it.

Keep reading . . .

Source: The Raw Story

Nick Juliano
Published: Wednesday October 24, 2007

New estimates show Iraq, Afghanistan will cost US $2.4 trillion; White House refuses to provide estimate

The United States is spending about $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to new estimates that show the wars will cost about $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

More than one-fourth of the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan — $705 billion — will go to paying interest on the wars’ costs, which are being funded with borrowed dollars, according to an estimate to be released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office. Iraq accounts for about 80 percent of the costs with a $1.9 trillion tab, including $564 million in interest, a House budget committee staff director told USA Today, which reported the numbers Wednesday morning.

“The number is so big, it boggles the mind,” Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) told the newspaper.

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Source: WSWS

By Bill Van Aukem, October 25, 2007

When it comes to profaning the name of freedom, there have been few speeches given anywhere that could seriously compete with the diatribe on Cuba that President George W. Bush delivered at the State Department Wednesday.

Bush used the word 25 times in a brief address that called for the continued tightening of the 47-year-old US economic blockade of Cuba and implicitly promoted violent upheavals, a possible military coup and stepped-up US aggression against the island nation.

The speech was timed to fall between Cuba’s recent municipal elections—the first held since the ailing Fidel Castro relinquished the reins of power—and next week’s vote in the United General Assembly on a resolution condemning the trade embargo that the US has employed in an attempt to strangle Cuba’s economy since shortly after the 1959 revolution. A similar resolution was passed by a vote of 183 to 4 last year, and this time Washington can expect to be similarly humiliated.

Once again Bush demonized the Cuban regime as one that has “denied their citizens basic rights,” “bought generations of misery,” and “offered Cubans rat-infested prisons and a police state.” Not content with these denunciations, Bush assured his audience of State Department flunkies and members of the Miami-based, right-wing Cuban exile mafia: “Cuba’s regime no doubt has other horrors still unknown to the rest of the world. Once revealed, they will shock the conscience of humanity.”

The immediate question raised by the US president’s speech is: who the hell is he to lecture anyone about democracy, freedom and human rights? If anything has “shocked the conscience of humanity” in the present period, it is an American president who came to power through the fraudulent overturning of an election, has waged unprovoked wars of aggression—killing over a million people—rejected the most fundamental democratic rights, and defended the use of torture.

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Source: Palestine Chronicle

Writers and intellectuals have a moral obligation to criticise violations of human rights and freedom wherever they occur. The Israeli military occupation of Palestine should be no exception.

By Priyamvada Gopal

We have become accustomed to theatrical displays of intolerance: death threats against writers, bonfires of novels, plays shut down, vandals defacing paintings. The danger, however, is that this obscures the more insidious forms that the suppression of dissent can take.

Announcing that the proposed boycott of links with Israeli universities would be illegal, the University and College Union asserted that debates related to the topic under its auspices would also be “unlawful”. On the basis of last week’s legal opinion (the details of which remain shrouded in mystery), the union’s leadership has summarily cancelled public debates to have been attended by “legitimate representatives of organisations from both Israel and Palestine”. Scheduled for a national tour this autumn, the carefully balanced debates had been described by the union leadership itself as a “sensible basis” on which to approach the divisive issue. As such, they were supported by many of us who, while condemning the abuse of Palestinian human rights by the Israeli state, questioned the ethical and strategic merits of a boycott. Now all engagement on the issue is off the table.

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Information Clearing House

By Paul Craig Roberts

10/24/07 “ICH” — — US citizens had best rethink the “war on terror” while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush’s blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done. Here is a short list of the Bush administration’s crimes:

• Spying without court warrants on Americans in violation of both the US Constitution and the FISA statute.
• The denial of habeas corpus, attorney-client privilege, due process, and Geneva Conventions protections to those, American or foreign, designated without evidence as terrorists or enemy combatants.
• The justification and use of torture to coerce confessions and the kidnapping of foreign nationals who are sent to be tortured in foreign prisons.
• The initiation of military aggression against states based on intentional deception by the Bush administration of the US public and the United Nations, and the intentional fabrication of “evidence” to justify unprovoked aggression against sovereign states, which is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the US.
• Violation of the oath of office to defend the US Constitution by practically every member of the Bush administration and Congress.
• Bush has assaulted the separation of powers and the rule of law with “signing statements” and “executive orders” that President Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean says are commands that treat the co-equal branches of government and the electorate as subservient to executive authority. In April 2006, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage listed 750 laws “challenged” by the Bush administration. Not even the demonized president of Iran claims to be above the law.
• Genocide against the people of Iraq where one million Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s invasion and several million Iraqis are displaced persons.
• Massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which is a form of genocide in which military force is routinely applied to unarmed noncombatants.
• Massive corruption in which no-bid contracts are issued to Republican corporations in exchange for kickbacks to political campaigns.
• The theft of two national elections as documented in books by Mark Crispin Miller and Greg Palast.

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Published on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 by Reuters

WASHINGTON  — An anti-war protester waved blood-colored hands in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s face at a congressional hearing on Wednesday and shouted “war criminal!”, but was pushed away and detained by police.“The blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands!” yelled the protester, Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz of the Code Pink organization which often disrupts hearings on Capitol Hill with protests against the Iraq war.

Rice, an architect of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, appeared unfazed by the incident, which occurred when she entered a House of Representatives meeting room to testify at a hearing on U.S. Middle East policy.

“Out!,” shouted the chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, Rep. Tom Lantos, as plain-clothes security men and police hustled the woman away. The California Democrat also ordered the removal of several other Code Pink activists.

Capitol Police said later five people were arrested, including Ali-Fairooz, who was charged with disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer.

She was also charged with defacing government property for smearing the red paint from her hands on the hallway wall outside the hearing room. The other four protesters faced disorderly conduct charges.

© 2007 Reuters

Published on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 by MinutemanMedia.org

by William A. Collins

Gives our souls,
An awful chill;
Sending soldiers,
Off to kill.

The full-page Army ad in the NAACP magazine reads, “You made them strong. We’ll make them Army Strong.” Besides focusing on these vulnerable minority parents, recruiters are nowadays even trolling homeless shelters, their lures baited with offers of $20,000 to leave “home.” Further, enlistment standards have been lowered for intellectual capacity, emotional stability, and criminal record. These are our own homegrown mercenaries, sifted largely from among the poor.

And while such troops may sound expensive to muster, they’re a bargain compared with the real live mercenaries we hire for Iraq and Afghanistan. American civilians over there get paid like generals, and foreign workers command princely sums compared to the scrabbly farms or brutal sweatshops back home. Like the Romans and British before us, our imperial military has become totally dependent on private workers. Halliburton and Blackwater are the new Hessians.

Keep reading . . . 

New book says US uses ‘methods of the most tyrannical regimes’

Source: The Raw Story
Nick Juliano
Published: Monday October 22, 2007

More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.

In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

“[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. “Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ‘stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.”

Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release.

The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.

Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes.

President Bush gave “marching orders” to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.

The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women’s underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.

“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable,” Jaffer and Singh write, “not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”